When the car was fixed, Graeme Couch walked three kilo-metres to the service station with Derek to pick it up. They said little, until Derek asked a question. 'Have you seen your sisters in the shower, Graeme? Have they got any pubic hair?' Graeme didn't understand what pubic hair was. He didn't tell his parents.
On 5 July, a chilly Saturday, Derek returned from Sydney en route to Cerberus and again stayed at the Couch household. He was short of money and borrowed two dollars from Jim Couch before making his way back down to Melbourne. Beryl was vaguely relieved to see him go, though she couldn't quite work out why.
24
The day that Beryl heard about Derek's arrest through neighbours, she collapsed. 'It was only two weeks after he had left our house and I had three children, the youngest only seven, and Anne had had a young friend with her as well. It was horrific to think about what could have happened to them.' It was to get a lot worse. Shortly after, three police officers knocked on her door and showed her the writings that they had found in Derek's locker. They were so dark, so disturbing, that even today Beryl struggles to comprehend the sadism in them. 'The writings were about me and my girls,' she says with a shudder. '"Go down below lake. Get her in car and take her to place." In another, he talks about tying us to a tree. It's horrific.' I remember the writings I have seen that almost made me ill, the explicit, coarse language Percy used to describe female and male genitalia, the detailed abduction of a mother and her children and the obscene things he would do to them. 'When I get there, blindfold them and strip them and have a good look and feel. Tie them to trees and ropes coming from behind under armpits, around behind neck and under other arm, and around tree . . .'
'I didn't realise, Beryl, that some of those writings were about you and your daughters,' I say. There is silence, for a moment on the other end of the phone.
'Now you understand my horror at realising he had been staying in our house and targeting us.' When Percy was arrested, the police refused to let Beryl see what he had written about young boys, but they showed them to her husband, Jim. 'He never told me what was in them, but he said to me to never mention that boy's name again in our house. Jim said he had never read anything so depraved in his life.'
Peter Couch was so distressed at hearing the news of Derek's arrest that a minister had to calm him down. 'I often wonder,' Beryl muses, 'whether the stress of that and blaming himself for putting his younger sisters at risk with Derek was the start of him getting the cancer that killed him in 1989.'
In December 1967, the Hosking family moved to Gladstone Park in Melbourne where they heard, two years later, that a sailor had murdered a young girl. 'I thought, "How dreadful,"' Barbara recalls. 'Ken had heard of Derek's arrest on the radio as he was driving home from trade school. His first thought was that there couldn't possibly be two people with the same name. He was completely devastated.' Upset and shaken, Ken spoke to Barbara as soon as he walked inside. 'Mum, you know that murder . . .?' and Barbara nodded. 'It's Derek Percy, isn't it?' she said.
Ken, she recalls, could not understand how she instinctively knew and she couldn't either. 'Am I right?' she asked, and he nodded. 'It was terrible, terrible news. This was the same boy who had lived in our home for months and who regarded himself as Ken's best friend.' Barbara has another reason to shudder. 'When Derek was staying with us, our daughter was three years old. He used to play doll's tea parties with her. It's awfully upsetting to think what could have happened to her.'
From the moment Ken heard of Derek's arrest, he vowed to not have any more to do with Percy and he entertained no warm thoughts or sympathy toward his old school friend. 'I don't have any time for people who touch up kids,' he says, his icy tone of voice leaving me in no doubt that he means it. 'He should have been hanged for that girl's murder.'
In the way that news is often spread, Barbara's husband, Harold, was told the grisly details of the murder from a local policeman at Gladstone Park. Barbara is still flummoxed as to why police, who knew Derek had stayed with them in 1965, did not bother to get in contact with them after his arrest. She did not have contact with any police officer regarding Percy for another thirty-eight years.
On 21 July, nineteen-year-old Tim Attrill was recovering in Geelong hospital from a car accident when a nurse told him that a naval rating had been charged with the murder of a young girl. 'I wouldn't mind betting,' he told her, 'that the bloke's name is Derek Percy.'
Bill Hutton joined the air force when he left school and read the news about Percy's arrest when he was at Laverton air base, Melbourne. 'Just as I saw the headline my phone rang,' he says. 'It was Kim White and we both said at the same time, "Derek Percy!" That night we caught up with four of the guys from school who had told us at the time that we were bullshitting about the Gorge incident. They were pretty stunned and apologised for not believing us.'
Hutton wonders whether Percy could have received help for his aberrant behaviour if people had taken the incident at the Gorge seriously. 'I've sometimes been asked why we didn't go to the police back then. But it was different in those days. Back then you would cop six of the best just on suspicion of bullshitting. And what we witnessed Derek doing at the Gorge sounded pretty far-fetched. Who would have believed us?' He is irked, though, that police did not speak to him and Kim White the day after Derek's arrest. 'It haunts me. Five years before he was arrested for murder we knew something was horribly wrong with him. His parents knew, too. The tragedy is that nothing was done.' Something else haunts him, as well. 'After each school holidays,' he explains, 'we would talk about where we had been. Given our age, we were usually travelling with our parents. Either Lachlan or Derek told me that they were in Sydney during part of the 1965 Christmas school holiday and in Adelaide for the same period in 1966. Which puts Derek in the right cities for the Wanda Beach murders and the abduction of the Beaumont children.'
Wayne Gordes was living in Sydney when he saw the story of Percy's arrest for the Tuohy murder in 1969. He immediately flashed back to the occasion at Corryong High School when he jokingly accused Percy of being the Wanda Beach killer and he recalled his strange, confrontationist reaction. 'I had said it as a joke at the time but suddenly it didn't seem improbable at all,' he says. 'They were definitely there in Sydney at that time; we all talked about what we had done during the holidays and my long-term memory is excellent.' After reading the news, Gordes rang his local police station and reported the incident. The officer took down his story but nothing further was done. 'I didn't hear from anyone again until the story hit the news again in 2004,' he says.
In May 2008 I am directed to a website called Gunplot where serving and former serving naval personnel keep in contact. Can anyone, I post on the site, who served with Percy at Cerberus or on any ship share their memories or photographs of him with me?
The replies pour in for weeks; emails from around Australia and from men now living overseas. Underpinning them all is the shock – palpable, still after forty years – that one of their own could do what Percy did; that one of their own – even this strange loner – could break ranks and disgrace not only himself but the entire outfit that he served. Percy deeply shamed them. Pete Brown, then a Leading Seaman, says that sailors worked as a team and were virtually inseparable. 'Percy's behaviour didn't just affect him, it affected all of us,' he tells me. 'If one sailor played up, the whole crew copped the stigma. We took it personally. Very personally.'
Les Dwyer, now National President of the Naval Association, was at Cerberus at the same time as Percy and was a member of the Cerberus sailing club. 'He often went away with us when we participated in inter-service sailing over long weekends,' he writes to me. 'He was a strange character in that when we were all looking to go out after an event and wind down with a meal and a few ales, Percy would often volunteer to mind our children. Thank God we never took him up on his offer. The wives all had strange feelings about him and preferred to babysit themselves.'
How clever Percy was, I think, offering to make hi
mself available for babysitting, to ingratiate himself with parents and children. And how often this happens. As a journalist I covered the trial of former teacher and respected international cricket umpire Steve Randall, who repaid families' trust in him by molesting their daughters. 'That man,' one of the girls' mothers told me, 'violated us in every way possible. I will never, ever forgive him.'
Dwyer was in the Personnel office when Percy's mother retrieved his belongings after his arrest. 'I remember his little car and the chalkish fingerprint powder that remained inside it. The whole affair was one of the most horrible events that I have ever been near. The thing that sticks out in my mind was the fact that he was seemingly an above-average sailor with a bright mind. What makes somebody like this tick? It is beyond me.'
Lachlan Percy only too clearly remembers when his family was told of Derek's arrest. 'My mother was very distressed, and my father very quiet,' he told police, many years later. 'As for me, I didn't want to know about it.' He admitted he was never close to his brother. 'We didn't ever have a violent confrontation or anything like that but we weren't close. I look at my younger brother, Leon, and I feel protective toward him, but I've never felt that way about Derek. And while we weren't a "huggy" or "touchy" family I don't recall any favouritism shown toward the other boys and not Derek.'
25
While awaiting trial, Percy spent his remand at Pentridge Prison, Coburg. Known to its inmates as the Bluestone College, a sentence to this archaic prison, freezing in winter and unbearably hot in summer, reduced many a hard-arsed recidivist to tears. As a student teacher in 1985, armed with a BA and fresh ideals, I studied for a Diploma of Education at Melbourne's La Trobe University. For units of practical training, I elected to do some teaching at Pentridge, helping prisoners with English and writing skills. There I learned that even the toughest souls could be brought to their knees by the simple understanding of a poem; learned that, despite outward appearances, even the toughest souls could be splintered emotionally. Pentridge was a bleak and uninviting place, a massive complex of security gates and barbed wire that broke many a man's spirit. One of my students, a man who had spent more than half his young life in gaol, fed two birds that nested in the alcove of his cell. He named them 'Morning' and 'Night'. He used to urge them to fly away and the day they did he wept with joy. Pentridge was like that. Even the toughest inmates knew that in this dark and depressing place, nothing positive could survive.
Elaine and Ernie visited Derek as soon as they heard of his arrest. It was heartbreaking, awkward, waiting for him to be brought to the small, bare room where they sat, struggling to find what to say. Elaine broke the silence, massaging her fingers as she spoke, her voice sounding uncomfortably loud in the foreign, barren environment. 'We've got to know, Derek. Please tell us, son. Are there any others?'
Percy had his first appointment with Pentridge Prison's Psychiatric Superintendent, Dr Allen Bartholomew, five days after his arrest. Bartholomew, a bear of a man and a raconteur with an imposing personality, studied him closely. Here was a young man, not yet twenty-one years old, clearly of high intelligence, who had committed the most abominable of crimes. He was not a slobbering, drooling madman with wild eyes and an incoherent tongue, obviously insane and needing to be committed. He was not outwardly violent, nor does he threaten the psychiatrist with icy, belligerent stares. Percy was polite, able to distinguish the correct courtesies by which to address people in authority. Good morning, sir. Thank you, sir. He expressed no fear when asked how he was coping with his first experience of gaol. 'Prison is all right if you go along with it and do what you are told,' he said with a shrug. 'Just like the navy.'
The navy looked after its young sailor, who it had once believed was officer material. Soon after his arrest he received his pay and the first of his fortnightly pension cheques. Using the frugality learned from his parents and savvy financial skills, he didn't squander this pension on luxuries like nice soap or extra food, but saved it instead, becoming one of the wealthiest prisoners in Pentridge. After almost a decade, he invested his accrued pension fund in gold.
If Bartholomew could get inside this prisoner's head, unravel his dark psyche, it would surely be a case worthy of being written up for a psychiatric journal. If Percy was found guilty and Premier Sir Henry Bolte demanded the death penalty – a high probability given the profile of his crime – then he had limited time to examine him psychiatrically. On the other hand, if he escaped the death penalty, Percy would undoubtedly remain in prison for many, many years to come.
'What made you do what you did?' Bartholomew asked and the answer came quite nonchalantly. Percy was overcome, he said, by a 'feeling – almost a compulsion – to do things to kids'. And he had had such thoughts for four years, he added, detailed, disturbed fantasies about abducting, sexually molesting, torturing and killing children. It was, Bartholomew later confided to a colleague, as though Percy's mind was a blank canvas from which he had erased both guilt and remorse. 'These thoughts worried him, but he did nothing about them as he never thought he would be game enough to act on them,' he later wrote.
Alone, on 15 September 1969, two months after Yvonne Tuohy's murder, Percy clocked up what would be the first of many birthdays in prison. His twenty-first birthday.
Derek was to be represented by a firm of solicitors, Caldwell and Berkovitch, but there were important considerations before the case could go to trial, not least of which was who will pay the solicitors fees and court costs. The Percys struggled to find the $3000 required and turned to Ernie's mother for help. A letter to Ernie from the solicitors advised him of her decision. 'We had a long discussion with your mother on 21st October. We gave her the blunt details of the case and the likelihood of success and after hearing from us she has agreed to provide the necessary monies to properly prepare the defence which will be pleaded on behalf of Derek.' What they omitted was that this was no financial gift. Secured against her house, Ernie's mother made it clear that the money was coming off Ernie's inheritance.
Bartholomew penned a report to the Crown Solicitor in March 1970, a month before the trial opened. For some time, he wrote, Percy had suffered a 'borderline psychotic state' and was suffering from that psychosis at the time of the offence, rendering him unable to reason with composure about the wrongness of his acts. If he was unable to reason the wrongness of his acts, went the defence argument, he must therefore have been insane. A diagnosis of insanity, based on medical evaluation, requires that the accused's state of mind at the time the crime was committed was diseased, disordered or disturbed and that the person was incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. Percy was not found to be unfit to stand trial or too mentally disordered to be able to instruct his solicitor. But as much as the Crown and defence may well have been in agreement that they thought him insane, evidence of that still needed to be presented in court. The Crown case would run dead; simply go through the motions. Psychiatric and legal opinion – that Percy was insane at the time he murdered Yvonne Tuohy – sat easily with the oft-expressed lay judgement that to have done what he did, he must have been mad.
Percy's lawyers worked long hours preparing their case for trial. The only issue that they would present before the jury was the sanity or otherwise of their client at the time of Tuohy's murder. And there could only be three possible outcomes from the jury's decision. If he was found to be sane and guilty of murder – a highly unlikely outcome given the prosecution was in concord with the defence – he could spend a determinate number of years in prison or, in the grimmest scenario, take a step into oblivion through the hangman's trapdoor from the death penalty. If he was acquitted – found not guilty by reason of insanity and therefore absolved from liability for the crime – he would be dealt with under the Governor's Pleasure system.
The power of the Governor to detain the criminally insane resulted from the case of soldier James Hadfield, who, delusional after suffering head injuries sustained at war, attempted in 1800 to shoot King George III at the t
heatre in London's Drury Lane. At Hadfield's trial, Judge Lord Kenyon suggested to the jury that while this was clearly a case for acquittal, 'the prisoner, for his own sake and for the sake of society at large, must not be discharged'. The verdict caused a clamour in legal circles: prior to this case, a defendant acquitted by reason of insanity was usually released back into the care of their family. To erase any doubt regarding the legality, the Criminal Lunatics Act 1800 was passed by the British parliament. The Act provided that, in all cases of treason, murder, or felony, if the defendant was acquitted on grounds of insanity, that person should be kept in strict custody until the King's Pleasure be known. The Act was subsequently adopted in colonial Australia, giving the Governor of the day the same discretionary powers to detain the criminally insane. While it was a compassionate approach to dealing with mentally ill defendants, it often resulted in persons spending excessive periods of time detained in a prison or asylum when there was no justification for continued incarceration. By 1970, though the treatment of mentally ill patients was vastly improved from colonial days, the discretionary power of the Governor had not changed.
Percy's trial for murder opened on 2 April 1970 before Mr Justice Pape. Percy plead not guilty. After the jury was empanelled, they were dismissed so Percy's defence barrister, George Hampel, a slight, dapper man with an extraordinary intellect, could address the judge in their absence. 'In this trial,' he said, 'so far as the defence is concerned, the only issue which this jury will be asked directly by the defence to consider is the issue of the sanity or otherwise of the accused at the time of this incident in July. Now, Your Honour, in my submission it is desirable that when this is the case and the only real issue for the jury, that the jury be told about that at the outset of the trial.'
Lambs to the Slaughter Page 15